Application of the Discontinuous Galerkin Finite-element Method to Seismic Modelling and Imaging

We present a discontinuous Galerkin finite-element method (DG-FEM) suitable to seismic modelling and seismic imaging in large scale 3D elastic media. The method makes use of unstructured tetrahedral meshes locally refined to the medium properties (h-adaptivity) and of interpolation orders that can change from one element to another according to an adequate criterion (p-adaptivity). These two features allow us to reduce significantly the numerical cost of the simulations. While the efficiency of DG-FEM has been largely demonstrated with high interpolation orders, we favour the use of low orders more appropriate to the applications we are interested in. In particular, we address the issues of seismic modelling or seismic imaging in case of complex geological structures requiring a fine medium discretisation.